(WIP) Luxury Apartment

Seraphim3D

Hey everyone,

I'm working on an envrionment piece at the moment of a luxury apartment.

The apartment in question is depicted on this website: http://www.home-designing.com/2016/04/two-sophisticated-luxury-apartments-in-ny-includes-floor-plans

I'm only building a small part of it because the apartment itself is absolutely enormous and I'm trying to focus on making a smaller, high quality scene. To that end, I would kindly request any and all feedback, criticism and general commentary. Please feel free to get your claws out and really rip into it, my intention here is to improve and therefore I'm after honest feedback, don't sugar coat anything. I'm going to keep posting updates to this thread as frequently as I can and it is my hope that by the time I'm done, I'll finally have finally achieved a realistic looking scene.

The first two images are the only areas I'm building. I'd be happy to expand outward and build the rest, but for now I'm limiting the scope to focus on the quality.

The website I linked contains the floor plans, including the sizes of each room. I've used those to build the scale and for the height, my research indicated that a building story in NYC is three metres high.

This is the camera angle I've attempted to replicate in Max and Unreal:

Progress snip from 3ds Max:

Wireframe:

And here's a shot from UE4:

Opposite angle:

I still need to make the cushions for the sofa, finish the armchairs and do something about the bowl on the table. The bowl appears to be made of bent sticks, but when I attempted that in Max, the tri count came up to 26k. I can't justify that for a bowl of all things so I'll need to either pick a new design or find some creative way to get around it with materials.

I've been doing a little bit of experimentation in Substance Designer/Marmoset for the glasses and alcohol. Figured I'd slip in an Archer reference while I was at it! The plan is to present this all in UE4, I was only playing with marmoset because it's drastically easier to test out a glass shader using Toolbag. I may attempt to set up the scene in Toolbag too but that's a wishlist item right now.

So again, please feel free to chime in with any feedback you can offer! I'm going to get to work on the cushions so hopefully I'll have something else to add by the end of the day.

Thanks for reading and I hope you're having a great day!

Seraphim3D

Small update! I was meant to post this the other day but life has been keeping me on my toes! I'm currently in a state of unwrapping so everything is chequers on my screen, but I've made progress on the meshing!

Normal:

Wires:

Compared to the source image, how does the scale look? Does everything seem like it's the correct proportion?

Seraphim3D

Material update!

I've been building a material for that parquet/chevron style floor. At the moment it feels like it's missing something and I can't quite put my finger on it. This is the material construction in UE4:

And this is the instance of it with some slightly adjusted parametres:

Textures:

Does anyone have any suggestions for how I could improve this? Is there anything more I could add to either the textures or the shader network to really get this looking good?

I'm really trying to improve here so any feedback is greatly appreciated!

Doxturtle

Looking good so far, keep it up

Seraphim3D

Update! Sorry it's been so long, I've had an eventful week.

Okay so since last time, I've set up some basic lighting in the scene and placed some temporary testing materials. Almost nothing has a texture on it right now, there's been a fair bit of fiddling with shaders and reflection captures and such. This is where I'm currently at:

The sunlight is a bit too nuclear so I'm gonna tinker with it and see if I can tone it down. Some assets don't have unwraps/lightmaps yet so I've got to get those sorted too.

The scene has a few doors in it and I'm not sure if I should make them a wooden brown or a painted white. Any recommendations?

As always, if you have any feedback or critique you'd like to give, please feel free!

Seraphim3D

Update time! Managed to make some progress but I've been struggling to deal with the light maps. Some assets just don't seem to want to play ball, no matter what I do with their second UV channels.

I've got some more placeholder materials set up and I've tinkered with the lighting/post processing a bit. I've got a placeholder shot of New York City in the background but I'll likely swap this out for a HDR if I can find a suitable one. This is where the scene is currently at:

As always, if anyone has any feedback or criticism, I'd welcome all of it! Thanks for reading and I hope you have a great weekend!

Larry

Have you tried baking the lighting? Your glass material seems great but from my experience the shadows they produce are very bad...And you will also notice that your bottle/glass material is showing your bottle a bit brighter than it should be in the scene. How do you work around these problems?

Seraphim3D

Larry said:

Have you tried baking the lighting? Your glass material seems great but from my experience the shadows they produce are very bad...And you will also notice that your bottle/glass material is showing your bottle a bit brighter than it should be in the scene. How do you work around these problems?

The glass brightness seems to be from the intensity of reflection captures in the engine settings. I can tone it down either in the rendering settings or via my post process volume.

The lighting is baked but only to preview quality. I've got some placeholder lights in the scene based upon the archvis example content that Epic provided, but I've yet to fully implement the interior lighting from the lightbulbs and chandeliers. Until I've got all those setup, I don't know if it's worth spending the extra time to build to a higher lighting quality? I'll give it a try if you think it will help display the current state of the scene!